Afternoon in Ostend

Afternoon in Ostend

Early in his career,
James Ensor painted a series of genre scenes that are known collectively as
The Bourgeois Salon. Like this
Afternoon in Ostend, the paintings typically depict one or two persons in a bourgeois
interior. Ensor’s younger sister Mariette frequently appears as a model in his work. In this
particular canvas, Mitche, as the artist used to call her, is sitting all dressed up at the table
of their parental home. The woman beside her is Catharina Haegheman, their mother. But despite the
identity of the models and the familiarity of the setting, the painting is conceived as a fictional
narrative. It represents a visit by a young bourgeois girl to an older woman. The two are drinking
coffee in a dimly lit room with half-drawn curtains. What is the nature of their relationship? What
thoughts are going through the young girl’s head? All is left to the viewer’s imagination.

Impressionist?

After this painting, Ensor was labelled an Impressionist by friend and foe alike. But although
Ensor was familiar with the fledgling movement of
Monet and
Renoir, the style in this painting is quite different. While he himself referred
to it as ‘an impression’, he always rejected his classification as an Impressionist. He felt that,
unlike his French contemporaries, he went beyond registering optical interplay between colour and
light.